Why This Quickly-Scaling Startup Hires Salespeople With No Sales Experience

Client acquisition platform JumpCrew just finished up a hiring challenge — 50 employees in 50 days. Many of these are new sales people — most with absolutely no sales background.

David Pachter, the martech startup’s co-founder and executive chairman, says this was a deliberate decision. His philosophy is that in this manner, they recruit and integrate more coachable employees.

“We are not shy about hiring sales people that don’t have sales experience,” says Pachter. “We are looking for people that are open-minded and are comfortable being uncomfortable. It’s worked to create an environment that is almost becoming kind of self-managed here, because we have highly motivated individuals.”

“We are working together to all become the best businesspeople together, and our commitment is to make the tools available.”

The Nashville company’s momentum can be seen in its latest $5.4 million Series A round that closed this past May, following a year where they tripled their number of clients. Pachter and JumpCrew CEO Robert Henderson are investing those funds in infrastructure, largely staff.

“We have a little bit of a backlog in bringing on new partners and we are growing to keep up with the demand that we see in the marketplace,” says Pachter. “I believe that demand is being fueled by our ability to execute. And that ability to execute ties back to the culture, mission and values component of what we put together here in a very short two-and-a-half year window.”

JumpCrew offers a suite of client acquisition marketing tools that help their over-200 clients across publishing, healthcare, media, and technology grow lead generation, and give insights into social media discovery, converting sales and closing deals.

“The problem we’re solving revolves around the lost art of execution,” says Pachter. “We are working with companies and helping them to acquire customers faster. We raise awareness, we drive leads and we sell deals. We’re a little bit of a next-generation outsourcing company for marketing and sales — that’s one way to think of it.”

The company is now up to 165 employees, with an average current hiring rate of 20-30 people in a month. Pachter attributes ongoing training, promoting from within, and teaching employees to be coaches as to why the culture has flourished — he says that new hire on-boarding often feels seamless.

“JumpCrew is a company of peers that help solve each other’s problems through a coaching methodology, as opposed to a manager telling someone what to do. We have an open office environment and people aren’t glued to their desks. We always sit new people next to more experienced people so everyone can learn from everybody else.”

Those workplace best practices will now be broadcast to the world on JumpByDesign, a new podcast series hosted by Pachter himself. The podcast will focus on sharing results-driven learning tactics that have worked for the startup so far, along with insights from tech leaders.

“Our mission is really to help our partners and the crew be more successful — accelerate achievement on a personal level, and accelerate the growth of our partners,” says Pachter. “We haven’t lost sight of the personal aspect of it, of creating an environment that leaves people feeling satisfied regardless of their KPI performance that particular day.”